FAA warns public against shooting guns at drones

It is professionally and personally satisfying to see the number of customers that are visiting and using the Delaware County District Library’s new Orange Branch. Truly, the facility and good library customer service have filled a need in that part of the county. We continue to issue dozens of new library cards every day and check out thousands of books, DVDs and so forth.

The Orange Branch is the fourth building added to Delaware County District Library. As you know, we also have branches in Ostrander and Powell and the Main Library in Delaware ready to meet your library needs. Currently, the library owns nearly 275,000 articles that are shared among all four facilities, and at any given time, about 20 to 25 percent of these articles are checked out.

We opened the Orange Branch with more than 65,000 articles on the shelves, and I am delighted to report that to date patrons have checked out almost 54,000 articles. Of course, a near equal number of articles have been checked back in, too.

We will continue to buy books, DVDs, and audio books for the thousands of children, teens and adults who use the Library; in fact, during the month of May, we added about 16,000 new articles to the Library system, with at least that many ordered in this month. As always, if you find what you are looking for in any of the Library’s buildings, please let us know and we will do our best to respond.

Why do quarters have ridges on the edges?

Ridged or reeded edges served a two-fold security purpose for silver coins, according to the U.S. Mint website (usmint.gov).One, they added an additional, intricate element to the coins that made them more difficult to counterfeit. Two, they prevented fraud. For as long as coins have been made from precious metal, a fairly common way to make a quick, ill-gotten buck was coin clipping. Clippers would shave off a tiny amount of metal all the way around the rims of a bunch of coins, collect the shavings, and then sell them. Working carefully, a coin clipper could trim enough off of coins to make a nice profit, but not so much as to make them noticeably lighter or smaller. A clipper could then still go out and spend his devalued coins as if they were unaltered. Reeded edges ruined this scheme, since a shaved edge would be immediately obvious and alert anyone who received one that something was wrong. Curious as to how many ridges on a quarter? The Mint lists its reeding specifications as follows: dimes, 118; quarters, 119; half dollars, 150; dollar, 198; Susan B. Anthony dollar, 133. Nickels and pennies are mainly composed of inexpensive metals, so the chances that they would be tampered with are low and for that reason they are not reeded.

When did Yemen become a country?

People have lived in the area for about 5,000 years. The Romans occupied Yemen, as did the Ottomans and the British. But the country of Yemen is only 20 years old. During the Cold War, political strife created two separate nations, pro-Western North Yemen and socialist South Yemen. As noted in The World Almanac, the two states reunified in 1990 to form the modern country. The capital is Sana’a, and of the roughly 23 million people living in Yemen, about 46 percent of them are under the age of 14. Yemen’s population is expected to double over the next two decades.

Did President Taft really keep a cow at the White House?

President Taft kept a Holstein-Frisian cow named Pauline Wayne on the White House grounds to provide milk for the first family. The cow was a gift from a Wisconsin senator, and she served her country for three years, during which she was a press favorite. Pauline was returned to her original farm in Wisconsin after Taft left office; she was the last cow ever kept at the White House. Presidential Pets provided this information.

If you have a question that you would like to see answered in this column, mail it to Mary Jane Santos, Delaware County District Library, 84 E. Winter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740-362-3861. You can also email your questions by visiting the library’s website at delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No matter how you contact us, we’re always glad you asked.

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